The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among ThemBrace, Charles Loring
History
The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them
Brace, Charles Loring
Child welfare -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions; Poor -- New York (State) -- New York
We gladly accepted, and soon secured a room, and gathered a goodly
company of poor children, mostly Germans. Fortunately for our
enterprise, we chanced on a teacher of singular ability and earnestness
of purpose, a graduate of the best Normal School in the country, the
Oswego Training School, and thoroughly versed in the "Object
System"--Miss Jane Andrews.
The founder of our school proved as earnest in carrying out, as she had
been generous in forming, her benevolent plan.
She took part herself, several times each week, in teaching the
children, and was indefatigable in promoting their pleasures, as well as
aiding their instruction. For many years now, this kind friend of the
poor has supported this school and labored among its children. They all
know and love her, and her memory will not die among them.
The great peculiarity of this school has now been adapted in the other
Industrial Schools, under the name of the "Object System of Teaching"--a
method which has proved so singularly successful with the children of
the poor, that I shall describe it somewhat at length.
THE OBJECT SYSTEM.
"I began with children," says Pestalozzi, "as nature does with savages,
first bringing an image before their eyes, and then seeking a word to
express the perception to which it gives rise." This statement of the
great reformer of education expresses the essential principle of the
Object System. The child's mind grasps first things rather than names;
it deals with objects before words; it takes a thing as a whole rather
than in parts. Its perceptive and observing faculties are those first
awakened, and should be the first used in education; reflection,
analysis, and comparison must come afterward. The vice of the former
systems of education has been, that words have so much taken in the
child's intellect the place of things, and its knowledge has become so
often a mere routine, or a mechanical memorizing of names. The scholar
was not taught to look beneath words, and to learn the precise thing
which the word symbolized. He was trained to repeat like a machine. He
did not observe closely, he had not been educated to apply his own
faculties, and therefore he could not think afterward. The old system
reversed the natural order. It began with what is the ripest fruit of
the mature intellect-definitions, or the learning of rules and
statements of principles, and went on later to observing facts and
applying principles. It analyzed in the beginning, and only later in the
course regarded things each as a whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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